Mona Charen is a perceptive commentator on today's society. Her column
each week in The Washington Times
and in other conservative papers is always worth reading. In particular
her recent wake-up call on the
alarming erosion of the institution of marriage over the past forty
years in America is deeply troubling. The ground is shifting
beneath our feet. May I share her comments with you here. They were
printed in the December 17th issue of the national edition of The Washington Times.

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Single
Belles, Single Belles, Single all the Way
Mona Charen The Washington Times,
December 17, 2012

Discussing the role of single people in the election of 2012 on my
weekly podcast with Jay Nordlinger "Need to
Know" (available on Ricochet.com or
Nationalreview.com), your humble columnist chose the insensitive way to
address it. Chatting with Jonathan V. Last of The Weekly Standard about his piece
"A Nation of Singles," I popped off that "Single mothers want the state
to be their husbands as well as to be the father to their children."

Jonathan put it better: "Well, let's say that single mothers are more
vulnerable to economic shocks and are more concerned about the safety
net." Much more diplomatic. Single
voters were a key demographic in 2012 (if the percentage of
married voters had been what it was in 1980, Romney would have won) and
there is little reason to imagine that their importance will wane in
the future. Singles INCREASED their
share of the vote from 2008 by 6 points.

Until about 1970, the percentage
of the adult population in America that was MARRIED never dipped below
ABOUT 93 PERCENT. Since then, marriage has been steadily declining.
TODAY, ABOUT HALF THE POPULATION IS SINGLE. THE UNMARRIED REPRESENT
ABOUT 40 PERCENT OF THE ELECTORATE, and they broke heavily for Obama --
by 16 percentage points among single men and 36 percentage points among
single women -- giving him two-thirds of his margin of victory. (By
contrast, Romney prevailed among married voters by 56-42.)

The MARRIAGE gap is also an
EDUCATION gap in America. Those with little or no college, and
particularly those without a high school diploma, are SHUNNING MARRIAGE
in favor of cohabitation. The college-educated, by contrast, are still
marrying at close to the rates they did in the 1950s (though later in
life, which contributes to lower fertility). Stable families among the
elites perpetuate their status, providing their children with the
financial and emotional stability necessary to lead fulfilling lives.
Highly UNSTABLE families among the LESS educated lock in INEQUALITY as
well, prompting Charles Murray to call upon the elites to "preach what they practice."

It isn't a matter of urgent NATIONAL
importance when NON-parents
choose to live together without benefit of clergy (love the old
fashioned expression). When CHILDREN
come into the picture, IT IS. There is simply no controversy
about the data: Two-parent married
families are best for children -- and best for society.

According to the Census Bureau,
ONE OF THREE AMERICAN CHILDREN GROWS UP IN A HOME WITHOUT HIS
BIOLOGICAL FATHER. These children are almost four times more likely to
be poor (44 percent) as are children from intact families (12 percent).

Fatherlessness (and while
there are some single fathers raising children, they are a small
minority) is associated with
increased incidence of every measurable pathology. It is evident
from birth, and even before. Children of single mothers have higher rates of infant mortality,
receive less health care,
perform more poorly on
post-natal tests, are slower
to gain weight and have more
complications. Babies with a father's name on their birth certificates
are four times more likely to live
past age 1 than those without.

In SCHOOL, the pattern holds.
Children from single parent families
tend (and these are aggregates, NOT
universals) to get lower
grades, have more behavior
problems, experience higher
rates of depression and other mental illnesses and drop out at higher rates. Children of single
parents are more likely to be
unemployed, get into trouble with the law and be incarcerated.
(Source: National Fatherhood Initiative.)

Cohabitating couples are FAR
more likely to separate than are married couples, which means children
often live with non-relative adults. A child living with his mother and
her boyfriend is at MAXIMUM risk. The American Academy of Pediatrics
reported that children in such households are 50 TIMES MORE LIKELY than
children of intact families to be the victims of physical or sexual
abuse.

There are simply REAMS of
social science data showing that marriage
is the best institution for adult and child happiness/flourishing. But
it seems that in America today, only activists for same sex marriage
are enthusiasts..... [Emphasis added].

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Mona Charen's reflections on contemporary marriage were echoed in a
news report by Cheryl Wetzstein that appeared in The Washington Times (national
edition) a week later, on December 24th. Here is Ms. Wetzstein's
report.

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Marriage
Culture Called the Key to a Stable Middle Class
Cheryl Wetzstein
The Washington Times, December 24, 2012

Although Americans spend $50 billion a year on weddings, a large segment of the population is making
an EXODUS from the institution, says a new report from a
family-values think tank.

The DISAPPEARANCE OF MARRIAGE in
"middle America" is tracking with the
disappearance of the MIDDLE CLASS in the same communities, and "strikes
at the very heart of the American Dream," scholars Elizabeth Marquardt,
David Blankenhorn, Robert I. Lerman, Linda Malone-Colon and W. Bradford
Wilcox said in a paper released Sunday.

They offer 10 recommendations to
President Obama and other policymakers to renew a marriage culture.

"One of the reasons MARRIAGE
is so important is that it's the best
thing we've figured out TO KEEP FATHERS CONNECTED TO THE CHILDREN
THEY'VE PRODUCED," said Mrs. Marquardt, director of the Center for
Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values (IAV).

"Fathers matter, and they matter for
everybody. We don't
have certain classes of children for whom [having a father] doesn't matter," she said.

The 10 recommendations include
ending tax penalties for married couples, investing in
relationship-skills education and premarital education for persons
seeking to form stepfamilies, divorce reform, and tripling the tax
credit for minor children.

Another tactic is for the nation's leaders, including the president, to
"engage Hollywood" in discussions
about POSITIVE depictions of marriage and fatherhood in the popular
culture, said the 2012 State of Our Unions report, "The
President's Marriage Agenda for the Forgotten Sixty Percent," which was
released by IAV and the National Marriage Project at the University of
Virginia.

A companion report, "Social Indicators of Marital Health and
Well-Being," showed that U.S. high
school students continue to have high aspirations for marriage: Eighty
percent of high school girls and 72 percent of high school boys said
having a good marriage and family life is "extremely important,"
according to Monitoring the Future surveys from 2007 to 2010.

But the steep decline in U.S.
marriages can be seen when marriages are measured against the number of
marriageable women. In 1970, for instance, there were 76.5
marriages for every 1,000 single women ages 15 and older. By 2010, this
plummeted to 32.9 marriages per 1,000 single women.

The "60 percent" referred to by
the report is the population, aged 25 to 60, who have a high-school
diploma but not a college degree.

Marriage is rapidly slipping
away from this "middle America" segment of the population, the
report said. As recently as the 1980s, only 13 percent of
children born to mothers with this moderate level of education were born out of wedlock. By the 2000s,
though, 44 percent of children were born to single mothers.

"The plight of this population who once married in high proportions and
formed families within marriage - and who still aspire to marriage, but
increasingly are unable to achieve it - is the social challenge for our times,"
said the report.

As a result, middle-American families are beginning to resemble the
"fragile families" led by high school dropouts, where economic stress,
partner conflict, single parenting and troubling outcomes for children
are not uncommon.

"We've had several marriage debates in this country," said Mrs.
Marquardt, citing Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1960s report on the black
family, the debate about single motherhood in the 1990s welfare reform,
and the ongoing gay-marriage debate. It's
time for a new marriage debate about the "hollowing out" of marriage in
M1DDLE America, she said. "There are a few things you need to do to be
middle class, and one of them generally is to GET AND STAY MARRIED."

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And finally - back to Mona Charen again - in the
national debate occasioned by the
ghastly massacre of twenty 6 and 7 year-old children in a Connecticut
elementary school, a development that is of increasing concern
for thoughtful observers of today's America is the thirst for mindless violence that is
whetted by the growing appetite for desensitizing video games and mass
murder movies. Here's what Ms. Charen had to say on this
disturbing phenomenon on the eve of our celebration of the birth of the
Prince of Peace.

In the wake of past mass shootings, when the "national conversation"
has focused exclusively on guns, I have argued that our appallingly inadequate mental health
system was a better subject of reform. At least half of the shooters in
the rampage killings that are ripping our hearts out are young men with serious mental
illnesses, and our system has neither the legal nor the financial
resources to get them the treatment and/or restraint that they, and we,
desperately need.

This time, mental health reform has received passing mention, along
with the usual pleas for gun control, better security at schools and so
forth.

Some control of ammunition might be useful at the margins (though the
Connecticut killer seems to have obtained his deadly arsenal from his
mother). As for security, some have argued that placing armed officials
in schools would profoundly alter the tenor of American life. I can
report that in Fairfax County, Va., where my children attend public
schools, every middle and high school has an armed police officer on
duty every day. It doesn't feel like a prison camp. It's somewhat
reassuring.

Modesty is called for in judging what causes these mass killings in
America and elsewhere. (Australia, Norway and China have also
experienced them.) Guns have always been readily available in this
country, yet these random massacres in classrooms or malls or movie
theaters are new. Is it the
dissolution of families? The decline of religious faith? The fading of
civil institutions, such as churches and community groups? Is popular
culture to blame? Is it the wall-to-wall coverage?

It's worth considering all of
the above. These are the acts of profoundly disturbed or insane
individuals, yes, but culture affects
the way even the mentally unbalanced behave. The rate of violent
crime has been declining for more than a decade, which suggests that we
are not in the grip of mass depravity. But if we believe great works
have the capacity to ennoble, we must concede that vile works can corrupt.

Mass shooting has become an American form of psychosis - with each new
horror inviting an even more grotesque imitator.

Mental illness takes different forms in different times and places.
Before American culture became obsessed with thinness as a standard of
beauty, anorexia nervosa was exceedingly rare. In Japan, a culture that
prizes social cohesion, people suffer from taijin kyofusho, an extreme
fear of offending other people through body odor or appearance. In
Malaysia, reports Scientific American,
an illness called "amok" (from which comes the expression "running
amok") periodically afflicts young men. They respond to perceived
slights with a brooding withdrawal, followed by explosions of violence.

With our splintering families,
declining participation in civil society and greater alienation, we are
nonetheless entertaining ourselves with an endless stream of depraved
violence and sexuality. Many kids are not having a family dinner
with mom and dad every night, but
instead are closeted for hours with a shooting game on Xbox. No one is
watching with them to offer perspective.

Violence and sex have, obviously, always been with us. "Hamlet" has its
violent moments. Yet the violence of
great literature, or even of ordinary melodrama, was usually presented
within a moral context. It was nearly always the case that
heroic figures used VIOLENCE TO
THWART EVIL, NOT FOR THE FUN OF IT.

Some filmmakers scoffed at the "antiseptic" violence of the old
Westerns in which the bad guys would take a bloodless bullet and cry
"Ah, you got me." Far better, it was argued, to show a simulacrum of
the real thing.

But viewing realistic violence and
suffering, far from repelling or sensitizing people, has the capacity to inure us to the horror,
dull our capacity for compassion and coarsen our sensibilities.
Worse, for a subset of unbalanced viewers, graphic violence is
perversely pleasurable. It may also be disinhibiting. The Columbine killers were great fans of
the movie "Natural Born Killers."

It will require tremendous effort, time and resources to repair our
mental health system. But it would be
a simple matter of will for entertainers to ask themselves, before
marketing a violence-soaked film or game: "How will this affect the
mentally unstable?"

Mona Charen is a columnist for
Creators Syndicate.

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All in all, all is not well. As the new year begins, in many sectors of
American society the hurricane flags are flying.